Just the Facts, Ma'am
by Laura S'mora
Summary: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as Ginny knows it. No fluff, no angst, just the straight dope. Now with Hermione's POV in chapter two.
1. Just the Facts, Ma'am

* * *

**Just the Facts, Ma'am**

_Let's not start at the beginning. It's such a stupid place to start. End of fifth year, that's far more interesting than the beginning._

When Sirius died, I thought Harry had died. That's when I reckoned it was a lost cause. I didn't think anything I could ever say would ever make a difference again. That's when I chose Dean Thomas. Dean laughed—he had a cute laugh, and the effort he put into things was adorable. He drew. He wasn't the quickest broom in the shed, but the way he thought was steady and sure. It didn't occur to him to have problems with his self esteem, but still he had no idea how attractive he was. So I asked him out, blushing a little, and he was so surprised he said yes without really thinking about it.

The date we went on was charming, and I enjoyed shocking him with my audacity. We wrote a bit over the summer—I could hardly believe some of the things I said, I was such a little whore—it was delightful. I laughed for hours, imagining the look on his face as he read my letters, until at last he snapped and the owl came back with my last message, and scrawled on the bottom in a shaky hand were the words, "Meet me on the train."

So I did. And we fooled around a bit, and then a bit more when we got to school. I was a terrible tease, and I got wildly inventive as I coaxed him slowly down the path of sin. But then Ron walked in on us in the hallway that evening after practice, and I didn't know why, but I felt the worst mixture of embarrassment and shame. Up till that minute I'd felt like I was running the show, and people talked about me and Dean like we were something to talk about. And everything I did was clever and saucy, and I felt like a queen—a real queen, who runs a kingdom and doesn't need to play dumb or feign weakness in order for men to find her attractive.

But Ron said "Oi!" and it was like suddenly my kingdom was nothing but a ring of teenage busybodies—a bunch of silly, clueless kids, and all it took was a half-wit with no perspective to lord it over them. Here I'd been thinking that I was brilliant and Ron was just an idiot—hanging out too much with Hermione tended to make him act stupider than he actually was—but now there was no Hermione in sight, and he wasn't falling for any of my charms.

So I did the only thing that occurred to me: I lied my face off. I just turned it around without bothering to even care who was in the wrong, I didn't really think about it. That's the alarming part—that I didn't even try to shove his insecurities in his face, that I just did it naturally. It's just one of the nastier side effects of living by the laws of River Psychology: what do you do when the river's rushing against you? Turn yourself around and pretend like you wanted to go that way anyhow. It's just logic. What do you do when you feel vulnerable and pathetic and wrong? Be heartless and domineering and right.

It hardly registered with me that Harry was there. Hermione didn't believe me when I told her that, but it's true. It was so far from being about Harry—it was about Ron, it was Ron who had put me in that awful dangerous emotional territory, and the fact that Harry was there might have made the feeling smart just a little more, but all in all it was a family affair.

Not that I never thought about Harry. I did—I couldn't help it. It was a gummy situation, that autumn. Not yet sticky, just a bit gummy. As I said, when Sirius died I gave up on Harry. Sirius had been rooting for me—he told me so, and the fact that he meant so much to Harry meant _so much _to me. When he died it was like a powerful councilor in the chambers of Harry's heart had been lost, and I was left with no one to champion my cause. Funny, I imagine that's probably how Harry felt as well, but in a much sadder, stronger way.

I didn't think I could relate to that strength—the distracting voracity of his grief. I thought he was going to wallow indefinitely, and I definitely knew I couldn't live with that. I can't relate to wallow-ers. A little time to deal with a loss is of course necessary, but when you injure your own thoughts and impede your own recovery just so you can stay in the lazy comfort of the emotional infirmary, you deserve every tear you shed.

But Harry didn't wallow. Shit—that boy bounced back so fast it was sexy. Granted, he did look a bit emaciated and pale when he first arrived, but his curiosity and determination to do _something_ pervaded his every step, and the way it felt to be in his presence was better than I could have ever imagined.

I still didn't fancy him. Hermione wouldn't believe me when I told her that one, either, but it's true. I was discovering my sexuality, and I felt a just a small amount of satisfaction in the fact that in one area at least, I was more experienced than either Harry, Ron, or Hermione.

Harry didn't even seem that interested in the dirty deed, and so it wasn't such a struggle to keep things platonic. And I was quite relieved about that, as it was really not a very convenient time for me to go falling in love or lust with my brother's best friend. I was already invested in Dean, so to speak, and I felt I had gone too far, and grown too attached to the control and security of that relationship to want to jeopardize it for a boy who could actually break my heart.

And yet _still_... Harry was a good friend, but deep down inside there was never really a moment when his friendship was enough to satisfy me. All in all, his reemergence into the picture of my love life was the emotional equivalent of taking out a second mortgage, and as the months wore by I felt exceedingly strapped for cash.

I remember very clearly the day when I decided that pursuing Harry looked like more fun than security was worth. Dean and I had been hanging around in the boys dorm during break, and the sight of Harry's bed with its curtains open gave me wicked ideas of the Fred-and-George kind. Dean left for Transfiguration, and I pretended to leave for Herbology, but really I skived off and went back up to Gryffindor Tower. I snuck into his dorm with every intention of leaving Itching Powder in his sheets, but I never made it that far. It smelled like him. I kicked off my shoes and climbed in, and for perhaps the first time in my life having sex with Harry seemed like a definite possibility. And not one of those someday-maybe possibilities, either, but a really calm and tangible feeling that if he walked in here right now I might just jump him.

I wanted to take a nap like that, all wrapped up in his smell, but knew that I would be fifty kinds of dead if I was found there. So I did the only logical thing: I stole his sheets and pillow, and traded them with my own. Then I took a bit of Fever Fudge, called for one of the House Elves, and told her to tell Professor Sprout that I was ill. Then I took a nice, long nap and had lots of really excellent dreams. And the best part, I realized while I was pulling my sheets over Harry's mattress, was that when Harry went up to bed that night he'd be haunted by _my_ smell—and I do have it on good authority that my smell is sexy enough to haunt—without knowing for certain that it was me, and having no way of proving, or even suspecting what I had done.

I practically let go of Dean at that point. I released him from my spell (don't look at me like that, I mean _figuratively_): I stopped flirting with him, I stopped making plans to do things together, and I expected him to break up with me by Valentine's Day at the latest. I had started the relationship, driven it, and now that I was no longer assuming any responsibility for it I expected it to peter out into nothing. But it didn't. He hung on, and I realized to my horror that he now had enough confidence to attempt to seduce _me._ I'd created a monster.

And I just _couldn't_ dump him—not now, not after everything I'd done. Hermione says it's cowardice not to dump someone when you no longer feel that way about them, but I don't think that's really fair. I cared about Dean, is all. I didn't ever want to hurt him—not _Dean_, not cool, honest, earthy, unaware-of-himself _Dean._ From the start, I just wanted to ask him out—let him know that he was really attractive, and maybe learn a little more about chemistry. It was supposed to be one of those mad hot affairs that will forever be recalled upon with fondness by both people, not _this_. Not this sad, gradual disillusionment, not this pain, or these persistent white lies. And there was never supposed to be any _clinging_. That was one thing I was sure I hadn't seen coming. When had Dean become the _clingy_ type?

In the end, I dumped him. And none too gracefully either, I might add. Regrettable, but then there was Harry. Didn't even have time to mourn Dean once he was gone, not with Harry around. Shit, what a sexy beast!

In many ways he was the opposite of Dean—he was all the initiative and none of the clinging. As much fun as it was running the show with Dean, it was nice to sit back knowing that Harry wanted me badly enough to come and rescue me from the library for a snog. There was a very specific place, it seemed, that I held in his life, and that was comfortable. It wasn't a very big place, certainly, but haven't I always said that I was most at home in little crannies where no one else could possibly fit?

Actually, the real beauty of those beautiful weeks was in knowing the greatness I was, however my small my place. Every time he kissed me, he made it seem like it was the most important thing he would ever do in his school career; the whole time we were going out, his permanent expression was this look like he was thinking naughty thoughts, or like maybe he was going to smile. Not a smirk, or a sly half-smile, but a dumb, teasing glimmer in his eye like a dog who was ready to play.

And when he smiled he looked ridiculous. He'd never looked ridiculous like that before. His face had always seemed perfectly well-proportioned, but now when he grinned it was clear that his mouth just wasn't big enough to pull it off, and it made my whole body hum with adoration and satisfaction. It actually got in the way—that stupid grin. You just can't snog a boy satisfactorily when he's beaming like that: there's not enough lip left over and too much enamel is exposed. I used to bite his lip and tell him to stop it, but he said he didn't know how—he said it was like he was eating powdered lemonade. I never knew what the hell he meant by that, and the only way to cure it was to stick my hand down his pants and distract him from that angle.

But then Dumbledore died. Yeah. All smiles wiped completely clean. Now it was a struggle just to stop him looking so sad. Now we were rounding the bases not for fun, but in a desperate race to find some peace of mind. And still it was good. It was good to know that I could be with him in the pits of despair as well as the dizzying heights of ecstasy. We fell asleep one afternoon in the sun, half-naked in our swimming suits on a blanket by the lake. We woke up with horrible sunburns—the blood-red culprit was starting to set in the west and our skin radiated in misery. I started to get up, but Harry peeped an eye open and pulled me back down on top of him. He was right. It was hot and it stung on the surface, but the inner ache in my chest felt so much better when it was pressed against his own; and we just laid there a while, reeling together, as comfortable as sunken ships.


	2. Truth With a Capital T

_Hermione tells the truth-with-a-capital-T._

I used to think Ginny was a fairly straightforward girl, which is why so much of the way she acted was somewhat shrouded in mystery to me. It took me a few years before I finally figured it out: her frank impulsiveness was not straightforward, rather straight-backward. Fear brought out the best in her: a fierce courage that was confident and unhampered by paranoia or rage. Pain and hurt brought out the worst in her: an insensitivity—an almost mean streak, and an instinct for getting to people and saying the thing that would hurt them the most. She played the devil's advocate to her own feelings, and she didn't seem to realize she did it.

For example, given her admitted crush on Harry, one would have naturally assumed that she would be disappointed about having to go to the ball with Neville when she was offered the chance to go with Harry. But she was excited about it—she went and had the time of her life and never mentioned Harry as anything but a friend again, or at least not to me.

The Chamber incidence, for another. A highly scarring experience, right? Nope, not for Ginny. She didn't avoid little black leatherbound books, didn't flinch at the mention of diaries and monsters and snakes, and was perfectly comfortable talking to people who happened to be called Tom. She didn't dwell on the subject, it seemed, but she was also capable of bringing it up almost casually in conversation if the occasion warranted it—as she did when Harry thought he was being possessed.

I was so sure that she would feel jealous of me for my cozy relationship both with her closest brother and the boy she fancied, but we became fast friends, and she did so much socializing of her own, befriended so many interesting people that I wound up being more jealous of her than she was of me.

She's my kind of woman. She's gutsy but she doesn't hate—except for a few choice individuals, and that's all right with me because they happen to be the same ones I hate, too. She's much more appreciative of my intellectual inclination than Harry or Ron, or at least she expresses it more often than the both of them combined, and she doesn't roll her eyes at me when I suggest the _wild_ notion of reading a book that isn't absolutely mandatory for class. Granted, she doesn't actually wind up reading it either, but at least she acknowledges that it would have deepened her understanding of the subject.

Harry and Ron didn't even try to sympathize with me in fourth year when I got my first big potions essay of the year back from Professor Snape. It was thirty-six out of forty, but he'd taken off as many marks as he could without finding any actual errors, and scrawled on the back of it, 'Ms. Granger, your tedious attention to grammatical and factual accuracy only depresses the insipid and wooden monotony that is your writing.'

Ginny understood how upsetting this was for me, to make me feel better she ran and got out a bunch of her old papers and let me read all the horrible things he'd said to her. And while we were looking through them, we realized that we could learn something from one another. While my papers all generally tended to have a few marks taken off for my lack of originality and bland style of writing, Ginny got horrible scores, with comments like, 'Congratulations, Ms. Weasley, I have never actually bothered to finish reading something that so completely missed the point of the assignment,' or 'It would have been gripping, had you any idea what you were talking about' or, at the very best, 'When I want you to render the subject of Shrinking Solutions with your own rare brand of humor I will tell you. In the mean time, five marks will be taken for your flippancy.'

She helped me with more natural ways to say things, and I helped her coerce her ideas into essays that were closer to what the teacher was expecting.

For a long time there remained a barrier between us—or rather, a lack of a barrier, which made me feel uneasy and guarded. I didn't understand why she liked me so much, or how she could be so completely above jealousy. It seemed fact that she had feelings for Harry and that Ron was the brother to whom she was closest. There was no doubting that. It was also fact that Harry, Ron, and I had a very close friendship, of which she was definitely not a part. But no, Ginny never felt any resentment at all. Was I missing something here? I don't usually miss these things, but...

I remember the first time I saw a piece of something in her that made sense. It was after the Third Task in the Triwizard Tournament, and Ginny and I were waiting in the stands when we heard the screams. I think both of us heard the word dead, and I think both of us felt the same swooping, nauseating tug of dread. _Not Harry, not Harry..._

Professor McGonagall found us in the crowd. Found me and Ron, that is. She didn't seem to even notice Ginny standing there as she told Ron and I that we had better come up to the hospital wing. "Just Ms Granger and Mr Weasley, I'm afraid," she said, addressing Ginny peremptorily, before she turned and walked briskly through the mob towards the castle. I followed her immediately, I didn't think twice, but I heard something that made me turn around. Ginny had cried out—the god-awful sort of sound a girl makes when she knows she can't express the consummate depth of her distress.

But it was all plain to see in the sickening grimace on her face, and in the ragged look in her eyes: she hated me. She looked at me like she hated me—hated me so much, with the kind of hate that was so fierce, so undeserved, and so insurmountable that it made her want to kill herself. My feet carried me back, away from that unbearable resentment, but it was an image that would haunt me for the rest of my life. That face through the crowd.

I didn't see her again until almost twenty-four hours later. I was trudging up to bed, and she was coming down, shivering slightly in her insubstantial nightclothes. That day had been a nightmare, and my relationship with Ginny was the last thing on my mind. But I was faced with her now, as she stood there, trembling slightly, and thoughts just crumbled and fell away out of my mind. I looked at her and she looked at me, and she still resented me, and I felt weak against my will, but all we could do was cry.

We hugged each other then, like we'd often hugged before, but for the first time in our lives we understood each other perfectly. And what a terrible understanding it was. I couldn't help having it, and she could never help wanting it. The immediate truth should have done us in, but still we clung together. We had labored for years under the assumption that there was nothing to resent, and we had built a friendship strong enough to weather the storm.

Fake it till you make it. That had always seemed like a bad idea to me before, but now I understand. I understand that there's no sense fighting something you can't change, and so you might as well cooperate until you find a way to make it better.

The only way to make it better, it seemed to me, was for Ginny to move on and _find_ something better. If she could just get past her feelings for Harry, I knew that she could forgive me for loving her brother. I encouraged her to say yes to Michael when he finally asked her out officially, and I lied a bit, saying that perhaps Harry would notice her once she'd moved on and started acting herself around him. The truth is that I wasn't banking on it. Not that Ginny wasn't a wonderful girl, but I didn't think Harry would allow himself to feel that way about his best mate's little sister even if the idea occurred to him, and after Sirius died and he lost interest in the only girl he'd ever fancied, I didn't think he'd ever have any time or energy for romance until after Voldemort was gone.

By that time I had noticed that Harry had come to value Ginny as a friend in her own right, and it made my heart swell with genuine gladness. To my great surprise, it didn't stop there. Harry began to actively include Ginny when he came to stay that summer, and they soon had a relationship of their own separate from the collective comradarie between the four of us. This also delighted me.

What didn't delight me so much was Ron, and the nasty turn of events that took place that November. After the canary incident, Ginny consoled me, and in our conversation it was revealed that she and Ron had rowed, and she had rubbed both his inexperience and Viktor Krum in his face. I was furious with her carelessness, and if I expected her to apologize for her mistake I was sadly disappointed. Perhaps this was a fresh manifestation of her straight-backwardness, but she insisted that she wasn't sorry at all for what she'd said.

"So what?" she snapped, "I told the truth!"

"No, Ginny," I said, seething, "_I_ tell the truth—what you did was just cruel."

And it was. Because the truth and the Truth in this case were two different things. The truth was that I had kissed Viktor Krum, and Ron had never kissed anyone, but this belied the Truth, which was that it really didn't matter because I had never felt anything at all for Viktor and I didn't care if Ron had no experience because to me he was still ten times more desirable than anyone else.

There was brief period of coldness between Ginny and me, and in distancing myself slightly from her and totally avoiding Won-Won, I had no choice but to cling closer to Harry. I felt as though I had been rejected by Ron, and my greatest source of comfort in those dark December days was in knowing that I was at least still the closest girl to Hogwarts' most eligible bachelor. It would have been ideal if we could have gone to Slughorn's party together. Ron, I knew, had always had a small, nagging, unfounded worry that there was something between Harry and me, and the fact that neither he nor Lavender were invited was bound to gall him.

But Harry, whom I had always known to be slightly dense in the ways of flirtations, fell short of my low expectations and seemed to miss even the most pointed hints I threw at him. I even tried scaring him into action, by revealing that Romilda Vane and her friends were planning on slipping him a love potion, and that the only way to ward them off would be to invite someone. Possibly, someone sitting right in front of him—whom he knew perfectly well did not have a date, and in whose company he could be certain of having a tolerably amusing time of it. But no, he simply looked down at his parchment and said lowly that there was no one he wanted to invite, in a way that plainly suggested otherwise.

I forgot all about his denseness as I recognized the symptoms. Harry fancied someone. Cho had been peripheral and rather random, and so in my head I began speculating wildly, wishing I had paid more attention to the school Quidditch teams as I tried to think if there were any other attractive seekers.

As for the party, I rebounded immediately and accepted Cormac's offer that very evening, a decision I would regret, as even Ron's annoyance couldn't compensate for the wretched company I endured on the night of the party.

I went back home for Christmas, and surprised myself in spilling out the whole ordeal to my mum, who sympathized in all the right places, and didn't overwhelm me with tired advice. The only suggestion she made was that I patch things up with Ginny.

"You need your friends, dearie, and even if what she did was tactless, her intention certainly wasn't to cause problems between you and Ron."

So when we returned to school in early January, I reverted to my usual warmness towards Ginny, and she seemed satisfyingly grateful for it. One of the first things she asked me, once we had resumed our soul-bearing familiarity, was whether I thought Harry fancied someone. I hadn't planned on mentioning it to her, knowing that his love life would probably always be a sensitive subject with her, but when she mentioned it first I admitted candidly that yes, I had thought the very same thing.

"I think I know who it is," she said, a glimmer in her eye.

"Who?"

"Me."

I was taken aback, not least of all by her boldness in saying such a thing. I decided that to contest the statement might be taken as offense to Ginny, and so I merely gaped for a moment and asked her what she planned to do about it.

She looked as though she was trying very hard not to smile, as she said with barely contained glee, "I don't know, but I think it spells the end of my relationship with Dean!"

"I thought things were going well with you two."

"Well yes, they were—I mean, as well as things can go when you're just fooling around."

"You've been dating for almost six months!"

"Six-and-a-half, actually—oh, don't look like that."

I didn't know how else to look. "So what, you're just going to drop Dean?"

"Well yeah," she said blithely, "I mean—it's Harry."

"I thought you were over him. I thought you said you had gotten to know his personality, and stopped idolizing him, and had realized his faults—" I'm not saying I'd ever believed her when she told me that, I was merely repeating her previous statements.

"Well I have," she said, "I know he's not particularly sensitive or thoughtful or anything, but there's no way around the fact that physically..." she trailed off with a lustful expression on her face.

At this point I officially did not believe her, but saying so would only get us into a very circular are-too-am-not sort of argument, so I chose my next words with a bit of care.

"So—you're only physically attracted to him."

For a moment, I saw the slightest wince tense the muscles in her face, but in a moment she looked perfectly unconcerned, though I noticed she was rather avoiding my gaze, as she said mildly, "Well there's nothing wrong with that—it's how he feels about me, I'm fairly sure."

Ah _ha_. Now we were getting somewhere. She just didn't ever want to be in that place where she liked him more than he liked her ever again. It was understandable, she'd spent years feeling that dull, lonely kind of longing—I didn't blame her for never wanting to feel that way again, even if it meant she was only fooling herself. Sometimes I really wished I could fool myself...

Nevertheless, I had to stop her from hurting herself too badly. I hadn't specifically noticed that Harry was attracted to her, but it made perfect sense, now that I thought about it. But he had so much on his plate at the moment—she had no idea. I was sure he could never give her what she needed—not with the prophecy hanging over his head. My heart ached for her then, perhaps more than it ever had before, and I dreaded the moment when I'd see that ache in her face, after he broke her heart.

"Ginny—Harry isn't the type to go for some physical fling, especially not with you."

"Ouch!" said Ginny, looking outraged, but not angry because she knew there was no way I meant it like that.

"I just mean because you're Ron's sister, and Harry's far too—"

She rolled her eyes, "Just because he likes saving people, you all think he's noble—he's not that noble."

"No, but ever since fourth year he has been pretty wary about jeopardizing his relationship with Ron."

She couldn't argue with that, and suddenly I felt very mean for putting that unnatural attempt at indifference on her face. "Well whatever," she said, "it's not like I had my heart set on him."

And that was roughly the end of that. The next time I had the chance of observing the two of them together, I began to see what Ginny was talking about. It didn't for a moment make me regret warding her off of pursuing him, but as the months went by I grew more and more amazed at him. It was _more_ than a suppressed physical attraction. He had a healthy, well-rounded fancy for her, that seemed to be in no danger of wasting away. But longing as he knew it must have been different from longing as Ginny—and I, for that matter—had known it. Ginny had been weighed down with the weight of unrequited love, and I could never count the number of times I had held back for fear of breaking some spell, but Harry seemed immune. It didn't seem to matter that he was in love with a girl who already had a boyfriend—he was just happy when she walked into the room, and lighter for hours afterwards, just for having seen her. And he didn't hold back around her, for fear of letting his attraction show—in fact he was emboldened, and everything he said seemed more sincere when he said it to her.

Had it been anyone but him, I would have resented it. But how could I help but to be cheered by that look on his face? At some point, even Ron began to cotton on, and it was only then that Harry made some effort to restrain himself around her. But even when he was conflicted, it didn't seem to be so bad. Just a disapproving mind, trying to keep a lid on an exuberant heart.

I was glad, but I can't pretend there wasn't a small part of me that felt a bit... out of commission. As much as I meant to Harry, Ginny had made him happier than either Ron or I had ever made him, and she had hardly even touched him. In an odd way, I imagined that this must be how it felt to mothers when their sons fell in love. It was just a very subtle shade of resentment, or the kind of sadness that comes when you know that things are changing. Poor Mrs Weasley—to have to experience this anew six times! And then I got really weirded out, and realized that maybe I had been, or would eventually be, the cause of that same feeling for her. I had never ever wanted to feel resented by anyone—least of all her. It didn't come as a consolation to me, either, that it was a very subtle resentment—the subtlety was in some ways the worst thing about it.

And I remember very clearly this moment: as I sat feeling that awful conflicted feeling and eating my breakfast, Ron entered through the doors of the Great Hall with that groggy, slightly hungry look on his face. He looked at me and smiled a little, and suddenly I clung to Mrs Weasley's resentment like it was my most prized possession—if any woman dared to take the weight of that mild bitterness off of me I might just scratch her eyes out. And as Ginny swung open the doors to the Hall a moment later, with Harry right behind her, I knew something else: I would gladly resent her. She could have my sort-of grudge and out-of-commission annoyance—I had cast them from me with love.


End file.
